History

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OLPC was the Trojan Horse to Open Source for Professor Stephen Jacobs, director of RIT’s Lab for Technological Literacy (LTL), the entity in which the FOSS@RIT initiative is housed. The LTL grew out of Jacobs early interest in computers as devices for education and media. Seymour Papert spoke at Parkmount Junior High School while he was a student there and his first computing job was running a Turtle Robot for the Capitol Children's Museum in DC when he was in High School. Intrigued by the OLPC Jacobs acquired three OLPC XO 1.0 laptops in 2007 via the first "Give One, Get One" program. His intent was to make them available to students for experimentation and to possibly create a seminar course in developing games for the platform.

The LTL also ran a campus Users Group with then lab associate Eric Grace from January to June 2008. Fred Grose, an active OLPC community volunteer, joined the LTL campus users group meetings and worked with an RIT usability class to assess OLPC usability in 2008. He also made a generous donation to the lab to fund some early OLPC work.

The seminar course was first offered in the spring of 2009 through the RIT Honor’s program. To support the class, Jacobs and Grace decided to create a community wide users’ group around the OLPC to support the class. Key members of the group were Grace, Grose and Karlie Robinson, an entrepreneur who runs the Open Source distribution business OnDisk.com.

Robinson, a long-time Open Source advocate, connected the class to Sugar Labs’ Math 4 initiative and the Fedora Community, which donated 25 laptops to the LTL for use in Sugar development in general, and Math software and games to support 4th grade curricula in specific.

The course was offered in March 2009, with Jacobs and Grace co-teaching and developing the materials and Grose and Robinson as user group representatives who visited the class regularly; roles they reprised in the next two iterations of the course. The class also attended regular user group meetings to meet with community members and discuss projects and techniques. After the first course the LTL moved to RIT’s new Center for Student Innovation (CSI) and began FOSS@RIT. The efforts documented by, and hosted on this site began there.

FOSS@RIT picked up speed In Winter Quarter, 2009, Remy DeCausemaker, RIT alum, joined the CSI as an Alumni Fellow and has supported the course, and the efforts that emerged from it, through to the present. Also in that quarter, adjunct professor David Shein taught the course for the first time. He has contributed to the development of the current course and taught it in its most recent offering. In fall of 2010 the OLPC Users Group merged with the local Python user group, which began meeting in the CSI and the current version of the seminar, now a full blown course, continues the tradition of holding class meeting in conjunction with the Pythonistas once a month.